09 August 2002

An anonymous baseball source yesterday announced that MLB's total operating losses would total over $450 million, which has got to be one of the most preposterous lies ever told, right up there with "What Holocaust?" OK, maybe not quite that bad, but still ridiculous. ESPN's stats page has attendance figures indicating that over 48 million people have gone to some ballpark, somewhere this year. This pace would lead to a total of about 70 million people going to games this year, all told, probably more. That means that if those people only spent an average of $35 each, including tickets, concessions, parking, etc, which must be an extremely conservative figure, then revenues from people going to games would exceed $2.4 billion! And that doesn't include broadcasting contracts, advertising revenues, merchandise sales or anything of that nature, which could easily total another billion dollars in revenues, all told. This would indicate that it must cost about $4 billion to run the 30 franchises, or an average of $133 million per franchise. For teams like Montreal and Kansas City and Minnesota, whose players' salaries only total about $30-60 million, where is the rest of this money going? Are we supposed to believe that the stadium lease and salaries for the accountants, travelling secretaries and janitors cost an average of $70 million? Preposterous.

BTW, I'm still trying to figure out how to use this Blogger thing. If you want to contact me, I can be reached at tmutchell@hotmail.com.